The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In a data center with large amount of storage space, a backplane is used to mount a number of storage drives, such as Disk Arrays, redundant array of independent disks (RAID) Subsystems, Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) and Fiber Channel (FC) Disk Array, and Switched Disk Array Servers. The storage drives are usually mounted on a backplane with a backplane controller installed. A backplane is a circuit board with connectors and power circuitry into which storage drives are attached. They can have multiple slots, each of which can be populated with a storage drive. Typically the backplane is equipped with LEDs which by their color and activity indicate the status of the storage drives connected to the backplane. Typically, a storage drive's LED will emit a particular color or blink pattern to indicate its current status such as a storage drive is attached to the backplane, working, accessing data, or in fail state.
Backplane controller is a device that can receive drive status and drive activities information through serial general purpose input/output (SGPIO), SCSI Enclosure Services (SES) or other proprietary protocols from a host bus adaptor (HBA). On the other hand, the monitoring and management of these storage drives can also be carried out by using a baseboard management controller (BMC) to monitor the status and activities of the storage drives. However, there is no direct connection between the host computer and the backplane controller. It is desirable to have a direct communication channel between the host computer and the backplane controller to monitor and manage storage drives installed on the backplane, and perform backplane controller firmware update using a protocol that is widely accepted in the art.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.